The Virtuous Image: Korean Painting and Calligraphy from the Late Choson Dynasty in the Smart Museum of Art

Although based on classical Chinese themes, such works reveal a specific Korean sensibility within East Asian painting traditions. Scholars saw in such works elegant reflections of a uniquely Korean ordering of the world, founded in part on their own re-interpretations of venerable Chinese Confucian ideology. This was the first public presentation of the Smart’s small, but select collection of Korean scholar and Buddhist paintings and calligraphy, which date from the apogee of Korean court culture in the eighteenth century to the tumultuous end of royal rule at the beginning of twentieth century.